It is impossible to say, of course, what he would have become if his life had been spared. The war had immensely stimulated his “political-mindedness”: he was obsessed, during the last two years of his life, with a sense of the precariousness of free thought and free speech in this country; if they were cut off, he foresaw, the whole enterprise, both of the social revolution and of the new American culture, would perish of inanition; he felt himself at bay. Would he, with all the additional provocation of a hopelessly bungled peace settlement, have continued in the political field, as his unfinished study on “The State” might suggest? Or would that activity, while remaining vivid and consistent, have subsided into a second place behind his more purely cultural interests? Personally, I like to think that he would have followed this second course. He speaks in the “History of a Literary Radical” of “living down the new orthodoxies of propaganda” as he and his friends had lived down the old orthodoxies of the classics, and I believe that, freed from the obsessions of the war, his criticism would have concentrated more and more on the problem of evoking and shaping an American literature as the nucleus of that rich, vital and independent national life he had been seeking in so many ways to promote. Who that knew his talents could have wished it otherwise? Already, except for the poets, the intellectual energy of the younger generation has been drawn almost exclusively into political interests; and the new era, which has begun to draw so sharply the battle-line between radicals and reactionaries, is certain only to increase this tendency. If our literary criticism is always impelled sooner or later to become social criticism, it is certainly because the future of our literature and art depends upon the wholesale reconstruction of a social life all the elements of which are as if united in a sort of conspiracy against the growth and freedom of the spirit: we are in the position described by Ibsen in one of his letters: “I do not think it is of much use to plead the cause of art with arguments derived from its own nature, which with us is still so little understood, or rather so thoroughly misunderstood.... My opinion is that at the present time it is of no use to wield one’s weapons _for_ art; one must simply turn them _against_ what is hostile to art.” That is why Bourne, whose ultimate interest was always artistic, found himself a guerilla fighter along the whole battlefront of the social revolution. He was drawn into the political arena as a skilful specialist, called into war service, is drawn into the practice of a general surgery in which he may indeed accomplish much but at the price of the suspension of his own uniqueness. Others, at the expiration of what was for him a critical moment, the moment when all freedom seemed to be at stake, might have been trusted to do his political